Friday, March 30, 2001

Limit: 47 people

This tour is wheelchair accessible

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the premiere visual arts survey museum in the Western United States. Its holdings include more than 150,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. Curatorial departments with major collections include American Art, Ancient and Islamic Art, Costume and Textiles, Decorative Arts, European Painting and Sculpture, Far Eastern Art, Japanese Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, Photography, Prints and Drawings, the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, and South and Southeast Asian Art.

Three of LACMA’s libraries will be open for visits from 5:30 pm-6:30 pm: the main Balch Art Research Library, which has a non-circulating collection of approximately 150,000 books, journals, and periodicals; the Doris Stein [Costume and Textile] Research Center; and the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies.

LACMA’s campus now encompasses six separate buildings on several square blocks. Started as part of the L.A. County Museum of History, Science and Art, founded in 1910 in Exposition Park (near USC), the art collection was moved to its present Miracle Mile location on Wilshire Blvd. in 1965. The Museum is located in Hancock Park, next to the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries (i.e., the La Brea Tar Pits). LACMA’s three original buildings were designed by Pereira & Asso.in 1965. The complex was enlarged, and its façade transformed, in 1986 by the addition of the Anderson Building by Hardy, Holzman Pfeiffer and the Japanese Pavilion in 1988 (Bruce Goff and Bart Prince). The former May Company Department Store became an annex known as LACMA West in 1998.

In addition to its comprehensive, eclectic permanent collection, the special exhibition, "The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland," will also be on view. This exhibition will explore two thousand years of art derived from and concerned with the legendary area that encompasses the American Southwest and Mesoamerica and more recently has become associated with the historical and political geography of the Chicano community. After art and books, sit back and enjoy the free Friday Night Jazz open air concert in the Times Mirror Central Court.